Andrew Sullivan is a brilliant journalist whose work I treasure, but he
is wrong on the gay-priests issue. He attacks me today for having a "gay
problem" when it comes to homosexuality and the Church. He's right;
I do. So does he. And it's on this dispute that the future of the Catholic
Church in America rests.

Sullivan is angry that in my comments in The Corner, I've often connected
the homosexuality of priests accused of pederasty with their alleged crimes.
He resents my comments about the "lavender mafia" running much
of the institutional Church (the phrase is Fr. Andrew Greeley's, and he's
hardly a Catholic conservative). He disdains my remarks about how some
gay priests in control of seminaries and chanceries use their power to
persecute orthodox, heterosexual priests and seminarians, and he resents
my remarks about some seminaries being not much better than "gay
brothels."

I draw those dire conclusions not on "hearsay," as Sullivan
says, but on reporting and years of conversations with priests, who have
told me more than I wish I knew about what it was really like in their
seminaries. It will be interesting to see how Sullivan will react to author
Michael S. Rose's forthcoming Goodbye! Good Men, which is the first book
I'm aware of to systematically compile these stories from the seminaries,
and to name names.

I've just finished an early copy, and what it documents is absolutely
astonishing, and cannot be ignored except by those who do not want to
see. This bombshell book reveals a seminary underworld in which homosexual
promiscuity and sexual harassment is rampant, in which straight men are
marginalized and demoralized, and seminarians who support the Church's
teaching on sexuality and the priesthood are persecuted, even to the point
of being sent off, Soviet-style for psychological evaluations. Many of
these guys are rejected from entering the seminaries, expelled, or driven
by depression to leave.

The book was substantially written before the Boston scandal broke, and
it contains damning information about the homosexual domination of St.
John's Seminary in Boston during the time that many of the priests accused
in the current scandal there were ordained. How can you blame people for
wondering if there's a connection between the outlaw homosexual culture
of that seminary, and the outlaw homosexual culture that some 80 priests
in Boston participated in?

Even seminary rector the Rev. Donald Cozzens, in his much-praised book
The Changing Face of the Priesthood, writes that the increasing presence
of homosexuals in the priesthood causes particular problems for straight
seminarians, and not for the usual bugbears of "homophobia."
The Catholic laity have a right to know if their Church's priesthood is
becoming heavily gay, and what that means. Fr. Greeley writes, "The
laity, I suspect, would say it is one thing to accept a homosexual priest
and quite another to accept a substantially homosexual clergy, many of
who are blatantly part of the gay subculture." What's more, I have
been told by a number of sources, including psychiatrist Richard Sipe
— no Church conservative he — that there does in fact exist
a network of gay priests who support each other, sometimes through sinister
ways (e.g., blackmailing bishops and others who threaten their activities).

I have connected the homosexuality of those priests who have been publicly
exposed as pederasts to their alleged actions for one main reason: The
media will strain to avoid making the connection, for fear of being accused
of homophobia. But this scandal cannot be understood and honestly dealt
with in its absence. We hear over and over again that "pedophiles
are mostly straight men." That may be true, but what we're seeing
with priests is not pedophilia, which is a deep-seated psychological illness.
What we're seeing is gay men who cannot or will not keep their pants up
around teenage boys. Not teenage girls. Teenage boys.

You cannot blame people for asking if there's something about the culture
of homosexuality in the Catholic priesthood that fosters this phenomenon,
if it's something more than a few bad apples, but a systemic problem.
Maybe it's not. But it is not homophobic to ask, and the questions do
not go away because Andrew Sullivan doesn't want to face them, for fear
of what the answers might be.

One reason this matters goes beyond the safety of teenage males, to the
theological integrity of the Church. It doesn't take a sociologist or
an investigative journalist to determine that people will go to great
lengths to believe things that will justify their sex lives. It's very
human; most of us have done it at one point in our lives. We've seen gay
priests and theologians, aligned with feminist nuns and other dissenters
(including heterosexuals, to be sure), working to change the substance
of the Catholic faith, particularly on issues of sexual morality. And
they're succeeding. In my experience, the only time most Catholics ever
hear anything orthodox said about sexual morality from the clergy is when
the Vatican says something. You can just as effectively change the belief
of the people by not teaching the truth as you can by teaching falsehood.

No serious Catholic could object to a homosexually oriented priest who
is both chaste and openly supportive of the Church's teaching. We're not
talking about these brave and faithful men. Does Andrew Sullivan believe
gay priests should have a special dispensation giving them the right to
be sexually active (as he apparently believes about himself as a Catholic)?
Does he believe they don't have an obligation to live by authoritative
Church teaching? Does he believe that good works and heroism in other
aspects of their priesthood exempts them from fidelity and integrity in
others (e.g., does Fr. Judge's bravery at Ground Zero earn him a pass
on the fact that he was unfaithful to the Church on sexuality?)

Or is it more important to Andrew Sullivan to be sexually active gay
man than a faithful Catholic? You cannot have it both ways. Hence Andrew
Sullivan's gay problem. Hence my own. Hence this painful discussion, which
will soon occupy center stage in the public square as the scandal unfolds,
and American Catholics are forced to deal with the homosexualization of
the Catholic priesthood in America.

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